“Euphemism and American Violence,” an essay in the New York Review of Books by David Bromwich, may be the most important commentary on the uses and abuses of words since George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” “Democracy,” writes Bromwich, a literature scholar at Yale, “exists in continuous complicity with euphemism.” And journalists are often the brokers.

There has sprung up, over the past five years, a euphemistic contract between the executive branch and many journalists. “A short, sharp war,” as Tony Blair was sure it would be, has become one of the longest of American wars; but the warmakers have blunted that recognition by breaking down the war into stages: the fall of Baghdad; the Coalition Provisional Authority; the insurgency; the election of the Assembly; the sectarian war. In this way the character of the war as a single failed attempt has eluded discovery; it has come to seem, instead, a many-featured entity, difficult to describe and impossible to judge. And to assist the impression of obscurity, two things are consistently pressed out of view: the killing of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers and the destruction of Iraqi cities by American bombs and artillery.

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